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Anca Dragan is one of this year's 35 Innovators Under 35

CS Assistant Prof. Anca Dragan has been named one of 2017's 35 Innovators Under 35 by MIT Technology Review. Each year, exceptionally talented young innovators are singled out for the honor because their work is thought to offer the greatest potential to transform the world. Dragan was nominated in the Visionary category for "Ensuring that robots and humans work and play well together" and is profiled in an MIT Technology Review article. She will also be recognized at a special ceremony at EmTech MIT.

Sergey Levine, Pieter Abbeel, and Chelsea Finn partner with NVAIL to take deep learning to the next level

Assistant Prof. Sergey Levine, Prof. Pieter Abbeel, and graduate student Chelsea Finn are featured in a CSO article highlighting research they presented at the International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML). The research was done in partnership with the NVIDIA AI Labs (NVAIL) programme. Levine’s team wants to help intelligent agents learn faster and require less training by teaching deep neural networks to learn more like humans. “Look at how people do it,” said Levine. “We never learn things entirely from scratch. We draw on our past experience to help us learn new skills quickly. So we’re trying to get our learning algorithms to do the same.” Levine and his team have been using an NVIDIA DGX-1 system to train their algorithms how to coordinate movement and visual perception.

NVAIL helps keep AI pioneers ahead of the curve with support for students, assistance from researchers and engineers, and gives them access to the industry’s most advanced GPU computing power.

Ken Goldberg joins ROBO Global Board

CS Prof. Ken Goldberg has joined the Strategic Advisory Board of ROBO Global, creator of the first benchmark index to track the global robotics, automation and artificial intelligence market. Goldberg leads research in geometric algorithms and machine learning for robotics and in applications from surgery to manufacturing. “Ken is truly one of the brightest minds in robotics and automation,” said Travis Briggs, CEO of ROBO Global. “His insight and expertise is sought after all over the world. We’re honored to have him on our team helping ROBO bring innovative solutions to investors in the US, Europe and Asia. ”

Stuart Russell is featured speaker at IP EXPO Europe

CS Prof. Stuart Russell will be speaking on the use of AI, its long-term future and its relation to humanity, at the 2017 IP EXPO Europe showcase. IP EXPO Europe is an information technology trade show held annually in England which "brings together some of the biggest names, in their respective fields, to tackle the technological issues facing organisations right now." Other speakers include Brad Anderson of Microsoft and chess champion Garry Kasparov.

CS Prof. Alexei Efros (also alumnus, Ph.D. '03) and his team have developed a new technique, leveraging deep neural networks and AI, to allow novices--even those with limited artistic ability--to quickly add realistic color to black and white images. "The goal of our previous project was to just get a single, plausible colorization," says Richard Zhang, a coauthor and PhD candidate, advised by Efros. "If the user didn't like the result, or wanted to change something, they were out of luck. We realized that empowering the user and adding them in the loop was actually a necessary component for obtaining desirable results." They will present their research into "Real-Time User Guided Colorization with Learned Deep Priors" at SIGGRAPH 2017 in August.

EECS faculty envision California's next-gen infrastructure

EE Profs Claire Tomlin, Costas Spanos and Connie Chang-Hasnain, and CS Prof. David Culler, are featured in a Berkeley Engineer article titled "Smart moves: California's next-gen infrastructure," which describes current UC Berkeley research projects that promise to transform the way we live. “What’s enabling these infrastructure changes is our ability to compute faster, to share information faster and to provide that information to users very quickly,” says Tomlin. She envisions “rail-to-drone” expressways, converting railroad rights-of-way to aerial corridors where closely-spaced fleets of drones travel safely. Spanos predicts self-monitoring buildings so smart they band together and form bargaining alliances, and Chang-Hasnain's team have been working on manufacturing highly efficient but low-cost solar cells by growing nanoscale “forests” of expensive photovoltaics on inexpensive silicon substrates. The Berkeley Institute for Data Science, co-founded by Culler, is “equipping students not just to consume data but to produce insight” which will help guide the changes to come.

Amazing Salto-1P is jumping longer, faster and higher than ever

Bioinspired robot, Salto-1P, is featured in an IEEE Spectrum article titled "Salto-1P Is the Most Amazing Jumping Robot We've Ever Seen." Born in Prof. Ronald Fearing's Biomimetic Millisystems Lab, Salto-1P is the most recent incarnation of the Saltatorial Locomotion on Terrain Obstacles (Salto) robot which was pronounced the most vertically agile robot ever created last December. Salto-1P uses a small motor and a system of linkages and gears to jump. It needs to do most of its control in the air because it spends so little time in contact with the ground, so it uses a rotating inertial tail and two little thrusters to stabilize and reorient itself in between jumps.

Somayeh Sojoudi appointed EECS Assistant Professor in Residence

Somayeh Sojoudi has been officially appointed as Assistant Professor in Residence in EECS (50%) and Mechanical Engineering (50%). Prof. Sojoudi received her PhD in Control and Dynamical Systems at the California Institute of Technology in 2013, and she was most recently an Assistant Project Scientist in Berkeley’s Department of IEOR. She was an assistant research scientist at New York University for two years, and a postdoctoral scholar in EECS at Berkeley for one year. Her research is in the area of analysis, optimization, and control for large complex systems, with applications in health care, Internet congestion control, and power systems.

EE Prof. Ali Javey and his research into "Earables," are profiled in a Digital Trends article titled 3D printed ear-mounted wearable will Monitor your body's core temperature. Earables represent a class of ‘structural electronics’ where sensors and electronics are embedded in the fabricated structure itself. “Monitoring core body temperature in a continuous fashion could have important medical applications,” Javey continued. “Examples can include monitoring patients with severe conditions, or infants.” Their goals include making the device smaller while expanding the range of sensors implemented.

Rikky Muller takes on the challenge of reverse-engineering the brain

EE Assistant Prof. Rikky Muller will make a presentation on the theme of Reverse-Engineering the Brain at this year's Global Grand Challenges Summit (GGCS). Muller is co-founder of Cortera Neurotechnologies, a company which designs medical devices for the treatment of incurable neurological conditions. "We can use devices that record brain signals directly from the the motor cortex of the brain and interpret those signals as movements," she says, "and we can use those signals to control robotic arms, for example, or mouse cursors on a screen." The GGCS, sponsored by the National Academy of Engineering (NAE), was created to help find solutions for 14 major engineering challenges critical to the future well-being of humanity and the planet. Muller will also be awarded an NAE Gilbreth Lectureship, established to recognize outstanding young engineers.